I have had a Macbook for a few years now and I've never had any problems with it. :)

But I have a strong hunch this thread will turn into another Apple-flame war, with hordes of rabid PC/Microsoft/Linux fanboys foaming at the mouth, bashing Apple and their products as if their lives depend on it. Just wait and see, it happens every time...

I really know very little about apple products. So i was wondering can you upgrade a mac? What upgrades can you do? Where can you get parts? Are there certain parts of the hardware that are not avalible for purchase? I'm just curious what you do with an old mac computer.

Nah. I think the people on this site that are knowledgable about computing are actually fairly tame and level headed. I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt. This place is a lot better for discussion than Gametrailers, IGN or Engadget. I'd put it second to Ars Technica for my list of online communities. Games are also a big plus!

What's best depends on the individual. Microsoft have pretty bad out of the box functionality but there's a ton of support in services, software and help from the massive community following it. I've also found it the best for development.

Linux is a computer geeks dream! It is capable of so much tweaking and playing around just to make it do so many things, useless and useful. When I got into Linux my grades definitely dropped some :).

Mac's have insane out of the box functionality. Almost everything, if not everything that you'll ever need is available to you from the start. People who don't want to waste time setting things up or tweaking things can have a great user experience right out of the box and stability is pretty good.

It really depends on where you stand for your computing needs and what software you've grown accustomed to. Also, before people start bashing me saying that a certain platform can also do something that isn't listed above... I know that there are a TON of factors and things that haven't been taken into account in that list... I'm here to give a general outlook, not write a book comparing them. Take it easy! You can't go wrong as long as you find which one works best for your needs.

My day job (when Im not doing dev stuff with my team), Im an IT admin for a school district- 99.9% mac based systems. Going into the job, I barely knew anything about them. Now, Im pretty well-versed in them.

We deal with Apple Care quite a bit, and they are really solid support. THe nice thing about the macs is that they're more kid-proof, you cant erase a DLL that easily and screw something major up.

I've been working with macs solidly for 3 years. That said, I still enjoy the home comforts of my PC. The compatibility with just about every program out there is still unparalleled.

My Macbook had been playing up, one of the fans didn't seem to come on, and when it did it made a horrible roaring noise. This in turn killed my hard drive losing me 7'000 words of coursework that hadn't been handed in yet. The hard drive was replaced but the repair company (not Apple) said that heat can not damage Macbook hard drives... WTF?!?

The fan continued to make the horrible noise and I found a programme that could measure the temperature of each component and the "CPU A" manage to reach a peak of 107 degrees C. ...0_0 it was then sent to Apple and they replaced the dodgy fan within a couple of days. However the temperature still occasionally reaches the 90s.

While I did get it for free its pissing me off. If I phoned up Apple and complained u reckon they would give me a similar good will package thing?

Oh and my 7 month old iPod nano just died on me -_- I genuinely feel like I'm cursed technology wise.

Bardicverse - I understand what you are saying. I use my macbook for work. Constantly using VMware..... I currently have XP, Vista, Server '08, Red hat and the Mac OS all on my macbook. I work on HL7 and the amount of different office I tour to work with amaze me with their different OSs. But lately I have been switch hitting it on what I enjoy to use. Just depends on what I am looking to do. Mostly young professionals use macs where I run into it.

JWS - yes you can upgrade your mac (limited). Nothing like you can do with your everyday tower. If you would like to see what you can exactly do just go to www.apple.com and check out the products.

Thatmax-  Couldn't hurt to try if you are seriously that upset! . 

I have never had a Mac.

sometimes i want a mac and then i look at the price and don't want one anymore.

I've used Macs quite a bit.

I really enjoy having a sleek-looking UI yet still having a *nix terminal and backend behind it. A lot of the default features such as Spaces and Timemachine are also pretty handy. Plus OSX has my favorite IM client - Adium.

I've owned a Mac since December 2006 and it's never had a serious problem (ie one that couldn't be fixed by turning it off and on)

I've owned an Ipod since September 2007 and it's been fine.

My windows based laptop however has problems pretty much constantly (although it was cheap so it's slightly more understandable)